I watch it all the time.
For the past 40 or so years, I've been following cultural trends, changes in language, advertising trends, racial relations, gender relations, politics, science, demographics and popular attitudes to various issues.
Is it bad for me?

Well, that depends on whether being aware of depressing facts is better or worse than ignoring them.

On the up-side, I've also had some fair-to-excellent entertainment and seen a whole lot of places I can never hope to visit and a lot of things I can never hope to encounter, in real life.

I don't watch hardly anything on television, and so am more aware of the ludicrousness of it all than someone who is hypnotized every day.

Television exists for one thing, and one thing only: to sell you something. The shows, no matter how informative, entertaining, enlightening - whatever you think they are, they are only there to get you to do one thing, and that is watch the commercials.

Even the ones people consider 'educational', like the History Channel shows, things on NOVA, or the Smithsonian channel, when you think about it, they don't teach you anything new, or if they do, it's only a tidbit, arrived at after being strung along through interminable commercials over half an hour or an hour.

The news is worse. The latest gossip; a disaster somewhere that has nothing to do with you, and some slanted political propaganda, fit in between, you guessed it, more commercials.

If I happen to be bored enough to watch something on TV, I mute all the commercials, and still end up so frustrated that I seldom watch anything through to the end.

I was muting a commercial a while back, and my sixteen-year-old stepson happened to be in the room.

"Don't mute that," he cried, "That's a good commercial!"

I knew then that we are lost, when we don't even recognize when we're being sold something, and mistakenly think we're being entertained.

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Mr. Ed said I should use his signature, since he's not anymore. In honor of his good friend Nok, here it is: "As far as smoking a cigar," she said, "I'd not know where to start or how to start." "It's simple," said I, "You light one end and chew on the other and hope to meet in the middle." To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

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(and suddenly the goblin was back to answering Nacia's questions, he read this one to himself and then paused a moment before relating something he had half concluded before, explaining "...a minute a day from the age of 20 to retirement age at 65 turns out to be 16425 minutes, or 273hours, or a bit over 11days then, ten minutes would be 110days, an hour would be 660days, which is slightly less than two years there, so that is the price of habit perhaps...", though the goblin remembered that in his childhood and he had often watched whole evenings of television too, he just restarted "...perhaps the answer isn't in whether something is good or bad in itself, so much as whether one actually has a long enough life to do it in, and what exactly one would have done had one not had that distraction there, yes I had many distractions back then while today I follow the news and pursue the interests of dailylife too, dare I say that these are also distractions in their own way, only that if I know that they are distraction now, may I ask what isn't a distraction really, and what my would life be like without those distractions there...")

Last edited by fleamailman; 05-15-2018 at 01:20 PM..

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Every once in a while I'll be reading an online article and I'll see one of those click-bait headlines in another column ("Twenty Celebrities You Didn't Know Were XYZ"). For shits and giggles, I'll sometimes give it a click, because to me it usually reads something like "Twenty Celebrities You Didn't Know Were Celebrities". Meaning I haven't a clue who's on television, who's on at the box offices, or who's supposed to be a singer. I don't watch any of it.

When I get the hankering to watch a film, it's usually a foreign film. Most foreign films operate on a much smaller budget than American films. You'd think that's a bad thing, but it means that they have to put more emphasis on developing a cohesive story or actually paying attention something called 'acting'.

On the whole (there are quite a few exceptions) I think most American actors and actresses are lousy. For American casting directors, it's much more important to be good looking than it is to be able to convey emotion. When I watch foreign film, I find it's usually the opposite. The actor or actress is surprisingly average looking, but you tend to feel like you're watching a real person who's alive in that moment.

During college basketball season, I watch games, but that's not exactly the same. That's real kids playing a real game, not some bullshit story someone made up. So, no I don't watch TV.

Back when cable TV came into being, people asked, "Why pay for TV?" and the answer was "No commercials".

It's been a long time ago, but I seem to remember MTV being preceded by the short music and comedy videos HBO used to fill in the gaps between movies, as there were no commercials.

People paid good money to watch TV without commercials, and when commercials were finally introduced, they kept paying.

Now you have to pay extra to get what they promised us in the first place (no commercials),plus I pay an extra ten dollars on my cable bill every month to get the broadcast channels which are blowing by in the air for free.

We're suckers.

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Mr. Ed said I should use his signature, since he's not anymore. In honor of his good friend Nok, here it is: "As far as smoking a cigar," she said, "I'd not know where to start or how to start." "It's simple," said I, "You light one end and chew on the other and hope to meet in the middle." To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

The Following User Says Thank You to Prodigalson For This Useful Post:

Back when cable TV came into being, people asked, "Why pay for TV?" and the answer was "No commercials".

It's been a long time ago, but I seem to remember MTV being preceded by the short music and comedy videos HBO used to fill in the gaps between movies, as there were no commercials.

People paid good money to watch TV without commercials, and when commercials were finally introduced, they kept paying.

Now you have to pay extra to get what they promised us in the first place (no commercials),plus I pay an extra ten dollars on my cable bill every month to get the broadcast channels which are blowing by in the air for free.

We're suckers.

We ARE suckers. But content is paid for by advertisers or consumers directly. With streaming services I can pay extra for no commercials, and I do. Oh, they still sneak them in sometimes, but I honestly feel like I avoid most of them.

I still take it in the bung-hole living here in America. You canít avoid all the anal rape. If youíre not stupid you can learn to enjoy a good ramming, see the humor in it all, but you canít completely disconnect. Well, you could, but you might become the Unabomber if you did. And nobody wants to be Ted.

Yeah, we get fucked here, but it is a voluntary fucking,except for gasoline - in a sparsely populated, isolated area like where I live, you cannot function without a motor vehicle. Gas is a necessity, and we are charged unmercifully for it (just under four dollars a gallon).

But everything else (cable TV, central heating), we could do without if we had to, so it's our choice whether we get robbed every month, or not.

It's watching that damned TV that makes everyone want more than they've got...

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Mr. Ed said I should use his signature, since he's not anymore. In honor of his good friend Nok, here it is: "As far as smoking a cigar," she said, "I'd not know where to start or how to start." "It's simple," said I, "You light one end and chew on the other and hope to meet in the middle." To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

The TV is a giant sluice pouring an endless stream of ordure into your living room 24/7.

Or, in my case, about three times a week for 1/2 hour or so. Usually not even that - when the show's reaching the end, and the commercial breaks come so close together and last so long that there's more commercial than show, I shut the damned thing off.

I don't care how interesting the show may be (it's hard to tell, with it being interrupted so often), if I have to have someone's intestinal disturbance, menstrual mishaps, arm stink or mucoidal lung expellations shoved in my face one more time, I'm going to bed.

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Mr. Ed said I should use his signature, since he's not anymore. In honor of his good friend Nok, here it is: "As far as smoking a cigar," she said, "I'd not know where to start or how to start." "It's simple," said I, "You light one end and chew on the other and hope to meet in the middle." To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.